Last night a casual conversation between me and Ross took an unexpected turn, and ended in a decision that will broadly affect the next two years of my life. How will they be different, you ask?

They won’t be: that’s the big revelation.

For a while now, Ross and I have been operating on the assumption that he’d apply to Ph.D programs at the end of this year — all over the country and abroad — and that sometime in the fall of 2006 we’d probably be looking at a pretty significant move. Maybe to Seattle or San Francisco, maybe to New York City, maybe even to Vancouver or some other far flung place. We weren’t sure where, but we’d almost certainly be moving. Which

a) Would be really exciting, and
b) Would be the perfect time for me to leave my safe, stress-free job and decide what I need to do to make what I want out of my life.

We’ve made lots of decisions based on this assumption: we haven’t gotten a pet, because we thought we’d have to move it in a year. We haven’t bought a real bed, even though all we have is my lumpy old mattress and box-spring, because we thought we’d have to move it in a year. And I’ve put off thinking about how I might want to change things for myself, like plan a new career path or go back to school, because I thought I’d have to move me in a year.

In the course of our discussion last night (which began with me reminding him to register for the GREs), Ross admitted that he still doesn’t feel ready to apply to school this year, and that he really needs some extra time to get a new job (with a more research-based company that will be better experience for a graduate program) and decide what field of computer science he actually wants to spend six years of his life thinking about, so that he can better convince an admissions committee that he’s going to be a good thinker-er. Which makes total sense, of course.

But it was still kind of hard to hear last night, because it lengthens the holding pattern I’ve put myself into for another 12 months. As long as I’m in Boston, anticipating a move in the relatively near future, it makes no sense for me to leave my job — even though I’m pretty sure it’s not what I want to do forever. While I’m here I want to take the time to build up good relationships and references at work, so that when we do move to a new city and I have to apply for a new job — possibly in a new field — I’m in a good place to do that.

I just thought I’d only have to do it for a year, and that I could wait and see about the future when the future came, attached to the adrenaline of packing and moving and discovering a new city. I guess I thought that somehow a miracle would happen when we left Boston, that the rest of my life would rush into focus and I’d know, just know, what the right thing was for me to do.

But two years is too long for me to wait for a miracle. If I wait two years to start making a plan, I know I’m going to be mad at myself. So it’s official, folks: I am in the market for a life-change, and now is the time to draw up the blueprints. I’ve got some ideas percolating that have been with me for a while. I’ve got some avenues to follow and lots of things to think about, and dream about, and happily envision while I sit at my desk in my cubicle, doing work that I enjoy but that’s not what I want to be proud of in the end.

People have asked me a lot what I plan to do next, and I keep telling them that this is my time to reflect, to sit with the big decisions I’ve already made, to settle. Well, I’m done settling. Now it’s time to rise. And I’ve got two years to figure out how.